What if we re-imagined it as Black Futures Month?
In last week's newsletter, I closed with a quote from V (formerly Eve Ensler) that read, in part, "We need everybody's voice right now. We need everybody's vitality right now. We need everybody's action. …We've got to build a new world, so we need everybody involved in this story."
One of our greatest ‘new world’ builders is Black Lives Matter Movement co-founder Alicia Garza. Over the weekend, I read a great interview with her in Yes! Magazine.
Today, the BLM movement is a member-led worldwide network of 40+ chapters and Garza leads two organizations, the Black Futures Lab and the Black to the Future Action Fund, which "focus on Black communities achieving the political power necessary to realize a just world, free from police violence, segregation, poverty, and disparities in health, wealth, and more."
In the YES! interview, Garza said that one of the ways in which she approaches this work is to think about Black History Month as Black Futures Month. As most of you know, Black History Month began in 1926 and became an official month-long celebration in 1976, that has been recognized by every US President since. Then in 2015, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) created Black Futures Month, which has become an annual synchronous event. This year’s theme is “Black Love.” According to the M4BL, “Black Futures Month is a visionary, forward-looking spin on celebrations of Blackness in February; a time to consider and celebrate our radical Black history and to dream and imagine a world in which all Black people are free.”
"One of the most important things that I take from Black history is that Black communities have always been futurists," Garza told YES!, "Because of the way that the rules have been rigged against our communities, we’ve been forced to imagine a new future with possibilities for freedom."
“And that’s why during Black History Month the Black Futures Lab spends our time focusing on the future. We take lessons from the past. We take experiences from the present. And we take this opportunity to really reimagine what our futures can and should look like, with all of us working together towards a common goal.
For me, what Black Futures Month offers us the opportunity to do is to reimagine a just society, a just democracy, and a just economy, where everyone has what they need to thrive and where nobody is getting left behind merely on the kind of merits of our race, our gender, our sexuality, our disability, our immigration status. We believe that all Black people deserve to be powerful in every single aspect of our lives, and Black Futures Month is really an opportunity for us to reflect on the work that we’ve done thus far to get us there, and the work that we still need to do to keep us going.”
— Alicia Garza in Yes! Magazine
I hope you'll read the entire interview. Garza goes on to talk about several of the projects she’s working on, including the Black Census Project, “an important step in transforming Black communities into constituencies that build power in cities and states." The Black Futures Lab is hoping to hear from 200,000 Black people from diverse communities across the country to learn what they care and dream about.
The Census (now in its second round), is open for respondents. Check it out.
Garza also talks about the ways in which the Fund is supporting and nurturing outreach, connection and feedback loops with Black voters on an on-going basis throughout the South, the Midwest and in California. It's exciting, important work and I hope you will learn about it, share it, and support it.
As a former college English teacher, I can't let this week go by without saying a few things about The College Board's decision to revise the framework for its AP African American Studies course.
The move came after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced last month that he planned to ban the class from being taught in his state's schools because he believed the curriculum was politically motivated. He said he had concerns about six areas of study in the class, among them the Movement for Black Lives, Black feminism and reparations.
The revision focuses mainly on cutting out the parts of the curriculum that engage students in learning about theories and ideas that are relevant to the national conversations we are currently having about race in America. It "deletes critical race theory and expunges or minimizes references to Black Lives Matter and the issues of reparations and Black incarceration," writes Robert Kuttner in American Prospect.
The College Board president stated that the watered-down version had been in the works for months and had nothing to do with DeSantis’s ban. That may be true, but as Kuttner notes, pressure from right-wing media and groups to change the curriculum began in earnest last September, after an early draft was leaked over the summer.
One of the scholars whose work was deleted from the reading list is Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Columbia University law professor and co-founder and director of the African American Policy Forum. Her work has been foundational in two fields of study that have come to be known by terms that she coined: critical race theory and intersectionality. She explained what intersectionality means in a terrific TEDWomen talk, “The urgency of intersectionality,” in 2016.
In an article about the controversy surrounding The College Board’s revisions to the course, Crenshaw said she was disappointed by its decision.
“She had believed the course would capitalize on a hunger of young students to learn 'ways of thinking about things like police brutality, mass incarceration and continuing inequalities.' Instead, she said, 'the very same set of circumstances that presented the need for the course also created the backlash against the content that people don’t like.'”
Garza and Crenshaw are just two of the many Black women who are building the ‘new world’ — a world that is more equitable, safe and healthy for all people.
That work begins with knowing our history, righting the wrongs of the past, and imagining and creating new systems to build a future that is possible if we lift all voices, stand in solidarity against pushbacks and backlash, and work together.
Onward!
- Pat
